14-Way PSU roundup - over 5000W put to the test

Are you looking for a power supply which perfectly fits your needs? Completely silent? Flashy colors? Adjustable voltage rails? 120mm fans pre-equipped? We round up 14 Power Supplies from known and less known manufactures to see how well they can handle an overclocked A64 system. Which ones stand out? Read on to find out!

Introduction

Short introduction

Nowadays computers draw more and more power. Especially when there is an Intel Pres(c)(h)ott CPU or nVidia's 6800 series videocard inside, to mention a few...

And if you want to spice things up by overclocking, the power usage will grow exponentially... Thus a decent power supply is needed.

For the last two months I've been collecting and testing power supplies. Thanks to the help of many shops and producers, I was able to test 14 PSU's. Including some flashy modded samples, some high power beasts, and even some fanless, passive cooled PSU's.

First of all I want to apologize for the long time it took to finish all the tests, my setup broke down twice. Not due to PSU failures, rather, events better be best described as “end-user errors”; dropping a screw on a running A64 motherboard wasn't advisable, trying to remove it with metal pliers even less.

13 out of 14 PSU's were tested on the following setup:

Piotke's Test Setup

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.4 Ghz 1.7 Vcore

Mainboard

Shuttle AN50R

Cooling

Thermalright SLK948 U

Memory

2* 256 MB Corsair PC3500 @ 200 Mhz 2-2-2-5

Video

Sapphire Radeon 9800 XT

HDD

Seagate Cuda 5 7200.7 120 Gb

Optical

Nec 2500 A DVD R

The last PSU, from Silverstone was tested on a different setup, but this will be explained later on.

And here you have a teaser picture, made somewhere halfway the tests:

FSP FSP300-60PN(PF)

FSP FSP350-60PN(PF)

FSP Aurora - FSP350-60PN(PF)

ZECK ZKS-300WX

ZECK ZKS-350WX

ZECK ZKS-450WX

TASK TK-945TX-DF (450W)

ASPIRE AS500W

Antec TrueControl 550W

Global Win SAF Eleel 380W

Global Win SAF Leleel 450W

Yesico FL-350ATX

SilverStone EFN-300

How I tested the PSU’sLet me also explain how I tested.

First I hot wired the PSU so I could use it without computer, and I measured the voltages with a multi-meter to check for inconsistencies, I scribbled the values down and will include them in the data comparison graph at the end as a reference only.

Then I hooked up the PSU to the system specified above, again I monitored the voltages with a multi-meter, using the external connectors from the PSU.

Finally I used the computer for a while, stress testing, surfing, gaming.. you know.. PC stuff. MBM registered values from the +3.3 V, +5 V and +12 V lines.

I have more than one model from certain brands. I covered each brand separately and dedicated one page per brand with brief data sheet only to include critical and interesting facts without chit-chat to get to the "meat".

The short introduction became longer then I expected, so let's go directly to the FSP PSU's-->